Simultaneous authentication and secrecy in identity-based data upload to cloud

Abstract

Most existing works to secure cloud devote to remote integrity check, search and computing on encrypted data. In this paper, we deal with simultaneous authentication and secrecy when data are uploaded to cloud. Observing that cloud is most interesting to companies in which multiple authorized employees are allowed to upload data, we propose a general framework for secure data upload in an identity-based setting. We present and employ identity-based signcryption (IBSC) to meet this goal. As it is shown that it is challenging to construct IBSC scheme in the standard model and most IBSC schemes are realized in the random oracle model which is regarded weak to capture the realistic adversaries, we propose a new IBSC scheme simultaneously performing encryption and signature with cost less than the signature-then-encryption approach. The identity based feature eliminates the complicated certificates management in signcryption schemes in the traditional public-key infrastructure (PKI) setting. Our IBSC scheme exploits Boneh et al.'s strongly unforgeable signature and Paterson et al.'s identity-based signature. The scheme is shown to satisfy semantic security and strong unforgeability. The security relies on the well-defined bilinear decision Diffie-Hellman (BDDH) assumption and the proof is given in the standard model. With our IBSC proposal, a secure data upload scheme is instantiated with simultaneous authentication and secrecy in a multi-user setting.